Foundations of Web

Foundations of Web

This article is fully focused on who is a beginner in web development.

What is the web?

The web is a virtual space or cloud, where all computers, servers, and machines with internet connectivity have connected through the internet medium. So the contents which are hosted by these machines will be available on the web and accessible through the unique domain names, for example, example.com.

What is the server?

server_Image.png A server is a computer with high specifications of ROM, RAM, and server OS. To be connected with the web every machine should have an IP Address. It can host our contents on the web with the help of host OS or server OS, In other words, it serves our contents to the client which sends requests to the domain name assigned to the machine IP address.

IP Address

ipaddress.jpg IP Address is a unique identifier of the machine across the web. And IP address has been found in two versions as IPv4 and IPv6. These two have 32 bit and 128 bit length addresses respectively. example

         IPv4 255.255.255.255

         IPv6  fe22:2071:dc23:a732:be22:2071:dc23:a732

To know more about IP Address

As you can see, It will be hectic to remember the IP address of every website that a user visits. To overcome this problem people have found one solution that is a Domain name system and which is managed by a DNS server.

Domain name System and DNS server

DNS.webp

DNS's job is to redirect your request to the mapped IP address of the resource domain name that your request contains. It is often referred to as the phone directory of the internet.

All your server IP addresses will be mapped with the domain name has given and hosted by a server called DNS server

HTTP and HTTPS

HTTP-vs-HTTPS.png

HTTP - stands for HyperText Transfer protocol which is the most often used protocol by client-side browsers to send requests to servers and it basically creates communication between browser and server to load webpages to view users. But the response of HTTP protocol could not be encrypted.

          http://www.example.com

HTTPS - stands for HyperText Transfer protocol secure. it also the same as HTTP but, The contents which are secured with an SSL certificate can only be accessed through HTTPS protocol because the contents will be encrypted in response.

      https://www.example.com

without SSL the response can not be encrypted and which means it can be stolen.

Request and Response

req_res.png Request is a kind of query that happens between client and server and the client can be anything from below

  • Browser
  • mobile application
  • desktop application
  • server

A request has two things are headers and payload.

  • Header contains the metadata of the request
  • payload contains the data required for the server.

Response is the data sent back to the client based on the client's request. which also have a header and payload as the request contains.

We should have some theoretical knowledge before getting into web technology and have some deep knowledge on these topics through self-exploration

sources: kinsta.com/blog/nginx-vs-apache lifewire.com/search?q=http

Thank You! ๐Ÿ˜Š๐Ÿ˜Š